After a wait that seemed like forever, I’ve finally had the Barnes & Noble nook in my hands for 24 hours. While waiting I experienced plenty of mixed emotions, from the initial excitement after the initial announcement of the device to moments of doubt following the lackluster initial reviews. The last 24 hours have been a continuation of that roller coaster.
First a little background. I’ve been an e-book reader eight years, reading first on PDA’s and later on smartphones. I have hundreds of e-books in my library. When dedicated readers first began to come on the market I was skeptical of the need. Why would I want a device that only did one thing? But beginning with the Kindle I began to have a change of heart. The appeal of the Kindle was the tight integration with Amazon.com and the ability to subscribe to magazines and newspapers and have them delivered directly to the device. But I resisted the temptation until the nook came along. This time I was sold by the tight integration with Barnes & Noble (particularly the integration with their brick and mortar stores), the built in wifi, and the Android operating system. Now, back to my nook.
After navigating the packaging and getting the nook in my hands all I could say was “wow!” It is an impressive device. Very solid feel in my hands. The size is comfortable, but it can be a little awkward to carry around in one hand. The e-ink screen is beautiful, after years of looking at LCD screens I was surprised by the difference with e-ink. It really does look like you are looking at a printed page.
The capacitive touch screen on the lower part of the nook is crisp and bright. A lot has been written about the sluggishness of the device, but in my experience this has been overblown. No, it is not as smooth as an iPhone. But it is about as laggy certain Android phones like the G1 or Hero, which maybe isn’t a surprise since it is Android under the hood. And frankly, it is more responsive than my DirecTV HD-DVR.
Two hours into my nook experience I ran into my first hiccup. The device froze. It wouldn’t wake up, and I couldn’t turn it off. I logged on to the excellent support forum at the Barnes & Noble website, and quickly found a thread discussing the problem. Their solution worked, plug the device into your desktop PC. I did and my nook rebooted. This brings me to another nitpick, the micro-USB plug. If you aren't familiar with micro-USB, it is smaller than the mini-USB that you probably are familiar with. It feels fragile. I'm not crazy about it, but I know that is where the electronics industry is heading so I guess I may as well get used to it.
It’s too soon to comment about battery life, but rest assured I’m watching the situation closely and will have full details in my upcoming review.
Side loading files is easy. When I plug the nook into my computer a window automatically opens and I can drag the files into the my documents folder. But here I encountered another problem. When opening non-DRM .pdb files it kept asking me for my credit card number to unlock the file. Once again, the support forums came to the rescue and I’m up and running. I use Calibre to convert the files from .pdb to .epub and they open fine.
Like I said above, newspapers were one of the big draws for me. This morning I went to the bookstore and purchased a copy of the Los Angeles Times. No problems here.
Long story short, I love the nook despite its efforts to convince me otherwise. Stay tuned for my full review once my nook has been fully tested.
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